It's March again, 2005, and this past year of BiyoArt has brought
about many firsts for the business. The first and foremost was
getting the expense ratio down 4 to 1. Still not in the black,
but sales are progressing in the right direction. Second was completing
a logo design for an international fashion design company based
in Pittsburgh. The third was finally getting unsolicited internet
sales and establishing the shipping and handling criteria for
the artwork. Fourth, was finding shows in areas where the expense
ratio warranted a return the following year. Finally, establishing
the proper framed website criteria to have content and images
listed top ranked on the search engine Google.
To begin, our expense ratio had to do with keeping shows basically
within the Northeast and at a show entry fee of less than four
hundred dollars. We are now authorized as a business to complete
on-site sales transactions in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire. We had
pretty good shows this past year in Buffalo, Cleveland, Glastonbury
(CT) and Pittsburgh. These states will be the focus of establishing
new shows that support the style of artwork produced at BiyoArt.
On advice from various artists on rejected slide submissions
from the various festival jury processes we went ahead and purchased
studio photography equipment to produce our own flash slide work.
It would appear that despite certain unwritten rules about submitting
slides of artwork without framing, it was concluded by general
consensus of other artists to submit slides that will best reflect
your work. The slides that we were using did not include having
the artwork framed, which produced a very washed-out appearance.
So, this years slide submissions appear less washed-out and more
focused on the artwork as a whole due to the border framing. Plus,
now we can do a photo shoot on our schedule as the need arises.
While attending the Pittsburgh show on Walnut Street, a young
Jamaican lady had admired the BiyoArt and asked if a logo could
be done for her international fashion design company. Now we get
all types and promises at these festivals and one can never really
be sure as to the likelihood of a follow-up, but one should always
error on the side of possibility. Well, she followed-up on her
interest and sent me in the direction of such fashion designers
as Baby Phat and Versace. One week later we had a preliminary
design and proposal of the Sartos logo utilizing the Swallowtail
Hummingbird from her native island of Jamaica. Now all that is
needed is an update to the website to include logo designs.
As for finding BiyoArt content on the internet, at least Google
has established itself as being able to crawl through framed based
sites once all the proper keys and routes to the page content
doors were mapped and made available. The BiyoArt Sports page
contents are listed on the search engine web and image searches
as its top spot or first page content. It was determined in the
design phase of the site that we could not compete with the keyword
'art', but we could with 'artwork'. The content monitoring site
Hitbrain lists each with a search frequency per month of 3.1 million
hits versus 1.0 million hits respectively. It was also determined
from all of the festivals attended that our little niche in the
art world just might be the Sports Artwork. The search string
people have used to find BiyoArt has been the two keywords 'type-of-sport'
and 'artwork' (i.e. running artwork, or golfing,
tennis, skiing, biking, football...). Now it's all about getting
more content pages, and artwork designed, for all of the various
types of sports; think Olympics.
>We also have yet to establish the ability to transact business
on-line with credit cards. It was determined a while ago that
based on the current framed structure of the site and the free
shopping cart menu available that it would require the building
of a separate on-line catalog of artwork selections. This new
window catalog would be invoked by a buy button on the artwork
content page. (But as I sat here and wrote this it occurred to
me that a majority of the purchases would be for a single piece
of artwork. The invoked shopping cart window should reflect this
with its information options and cgi script entries. A catalog
of artwork would not be necessary, just the ability to select
other pieces of artwork from drop down menus as a separate line
item if more than one purchase is required. Wonder if Agoracart
can be configured this way?) Guess it's time to revisit the script
and secure e-mail settings again.
It's been real
We'll have to do it again real soon.
Talk at ya.